Revised ILS-Discovery interface recommendation released

The Digital Library Federation’s ILS-DI task group has officially released revision 1.1 of their recommendation for standard interfaces for integrating the data and services of the Integrated Library System (ILS) with new applications supporting user discovery.

Our initial official release (“revision 1.0″) was made in June, and included a recommendation of a basic level of interoperability (the Basic Discovery Interfaces, or “Level 1″ interoperability) that was agreed to by many ILS vendors in the “Berkeley Accord“.

In August, the DLF convened an implementor’s meeting in Berkeley that was attended by a number of developers and vendors of ILS and discovery software. In the meeting, we agreed to make certain changes to clarify the requirements of the basic level of compliance, and to make them more useful for discovery applications. A revised draft that included these changes was made available for comment at the end of October. We now release the final version.

We hope that this revision will be useful for people implementing ILS’s, ILS interaction layers, and discovery applications, and enable easier interoperation between ILS’s (existing and planned) and innovative discovery applications of all kinds. We look forward to seeing implementations of these recommendations (some of which are already in progress), and further progress towards interoperability and improved discovery of the knowledge resources of libraries.